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" If you don&amp;#039;t know the 27-year-old actor by name, you might think of him as that guy on the rise who reminds you of\u2014and here is where people have gotten creative\u2014a young John Cusack (the most common so far), a pre-pandemonium Shia LaBeouf, or a modern-day Elvis Presley (that one&amp;#039;s his own suggestion). But the name most often connected to Teller&amp;#039;s is Shailene Woodley, whom he starred alongside as the alcoholic good-times high schooler Sutter Keely in The Spectacular Now and again as Woodley&amp;#039;s dickish nemesis, Peter, in Divergent. It&amp;#039;s not surprising the friends have good professional chemistry (Woodley recently called Teller the George Clooney to her Julia Roberts); there&amp;#039;s a similar sense of honesty and individuality to their work, and like Woodley, Teller is part of a wave of young film actors scrapping the Hollywood mold in favor of decidedly keeping it real. Teller is serious about not being too serious, which might have something to do with his brush with death seven years ago, when he went flying out of a friend&amp;#039;s car window and wound up with 20 staples to his shoulder and severe facial scarring. He&amp;#039;s the kind of guy who has &amp;quot;buddies&amp;quot; in lieu of &amp;quot;friends,&amp;quot; who scripts himself as the punch line of his own stories, and who doesn&amp;#039;t try to cover up an obvious hangover when I call. This season, Teller&amp;#039;s dance card is full. He stars as a jazz drummer in director Damien Chazelle&amp;#039;s Sundance opener Whiplash and plays Mr. Fantastic in the upcoming Fantastic Four reboot. He&amp;#039;s also working on Chazelle&amp;#039;s much buzzed-about next project, a studio-era-type movie musical called La La Land, co-starring Emma Watson. In the best morning croak he could muster (not bad), Teller caught me up on these latest achievements\u2014and fessed up to his Sutter Keely qualities and how he wooed his girlfriend, model Keleigh Sperry, on the dance floor. You sound tired. I&amp;#039;m just powering through the coffee. You know how these things go. They bring you up for a film festival, and it&amp;#039;s the after parties and then the very early press. So you&amp;#039;re not a morning person. I actually have been a morning person because I&amp;#039;ve been training for this boxing movie. You kind of have to become one. But if I don&amp;#039;t have a schedule in front of me, I do enjoy sleeping. It&amp;#039;s important for your body! Although you&amp;#039;re supposed to get those hours in earlier on in the night. Those are allegedly better, right? I feel like my body doesn&amp;#039;t judge the hours, you know? It doesn&amp;#039;t care if it&amp;#039;s daytime or nighttime. It&amp;#039;s just grateful for the hours. How equitable of your body. My body&amp;#039;s pretty cool like that. Like your character in Whiplash, you grew up playing drums\u2014and sax, actually. Were you a band geek? I was not a band geek, per say. But me and my two older sisters played instruments, so I would come home and my sister Dana would be playing the clarinet or playing the piano, and I would play the saxophone, my other sister would be singing, my mom would be singing. I was not afraid to be musical. That was not something that I thought was uncool. In middle school I was in marching band, which can be fairly uncool, I guess. But it was all fun, man! Did you ever Jackson 5 it and form a family band? Hell, no. I think my mom always wanted like a Partridge Family kind of thing because we all played instruments. My mom is very proud of introducing music to all her kids. But no, I played in some bad rock bands my junior and senior years of high school. And in California, I still have my drum set, and me and the buddies will get on it and jam out. What was your band name? When I was in high school our band name was The Mutes because we were playing the homecoming day parade, and the generators on our float went out so there was no sound. Hence, The Mutes were spawned. What was it like growing up in small-town Florida? Were you a Sutter Keely type? Kind of. Without the complete disregard for moving past high school. I always knew I was going to go to college. Me and my buddies would throw the parties. We&amp;#039;d be drinking at the party and all that, but I also was getting 4.0s and was in National Honors Society and took AP classes. My friends to this day are like, &amp;quot;We had no idea that you were getting straight A&amp;#039;s when you were out partying with us!&amp;quot; I guess I had balance, and that&amp;#039;s not something that Sutter Keely had. It was a very small town in Florida where you kind of make your own fun. A lot of sitting outside. A lot of bonfires. What&amp;#039;s your go-to bonfire song? We used to play &amp;quot;Gimme the Beat Boys.&amp;quot; That&amp;#039;s a good one. Tracy Chapman, &amp;quot;Give Me One Reason.&amp;quot; Those were the popular ones. Lynyrd Skynyrd &amp;quot;Simple Man.&amp;quot; So are you the guy banging on the bongos? I would be the dude playing the guitar and singing. And then I also have a djembe, which is the African hand drum. You&amp;#039;re the guy with the djembe at the bonfire? I love that guy. Yeah [laughs]. You have to slowly work it in, though. At the beginning of the night, you start with the guitar, and by the end of the night, when people are going to get their buzz on and you want to get tribal, then you bust out the djembe. And everyone&amp;#039;s moving. Whom have you become closest to from working with them on a movie? Each movie, it seems like you gravitate towards one or two people. For Whiplash, that was Damien. Damien and I were slowly building a relationship. We&amp;#039;re working on his next film together, which is great. That&amp;#039;s the first time I&amp;#039;ll work with a director twice. I&amp;#039;m still good friends with Kenny Wormald who I worked on Footloose with; Justin Chon from 21 and Over; Shailene Woodley is a very good friend of mine, and it seems like I&amp;#039;m working with her every year. And Jai [Courtney] is a dude from Divergent\u2014he&amp;#039;s a good friend of mine. What&amp;#039;s your idea of a fun boys&amp;#039; night? We don&amp;#039;t call them that! [laughs] Just go to a bar, watch football\u2014that&amp;#039;s fun to me because I&amp;#039;ve not gotten to see anything because I&amp;#039;ve been travelling so much. Playing some shuffleboard and some pool and darts. I like kind of dive-y bars. Do you remember how you wooed your girlfriend, Keleigh? I met her at a Grammy party. My buddy was kind of hitting on her. I think he got too drunk, so I took over. You got into a major car accident when you were 20. Do you think about the crash a lot? Not really, at this point. There was a period where that was the center of my world. Physically, the scars were very apparent. I was so surprised by how comfortable people felt staring at me or coming up and being like &amp;quot;Oh my god\u2014what happened to your face?&amp;quot; It took a little bit for me to understand the severity of the accident and how lucky I was to survive. I had the doctors tell me that 99.9% of the time when you get in a car accident like that, you are dead or paralyzed. For a couple years, it was very significant to me, but at this point I don&amp;#039;t even notice the scars. People don&amp;#039;t notice them, and that helps me not notice them. You told ELLE a while back that you have a hand double because you&amp;#039;re insecure about your hands. Were you teased about them? When I was younger I used to hide my thumbs in photos and stuff, or else people would be like &amp;quot;Ew! What&amp;#039;s up with your thumb?!&amp;quot; They call it Brachydactyly Type B, or some people call it &amp;quot;toe-thumb.&amp;quot; Megan Fox has it. It&amp;#039;s just that you have, like, a fat thumb. Getting older, you make jokes or don&amp;#039;t really care so much because at the end of the day, it&amp;#039;s a thumb. But when I was doing this one movie, Get A Job, we were doing this close-up of my character on a cell phone, and the director&amp;#039;s just like &amp;quot;Cut! Can we get somebody else&amp;#039;s hand in there?&amp;quot; I do bite my fingernails, and you don&amp;#039;t want to see a fat, bitten thumbnail on a 30-foot movie screen, so I get somebody with really nice, sexy hands and put &amp;#039;em in there. So you weren&amp;#039;t a thumbs up guy? I probably didn&amp;#039;t give a thumbs up until I was about 15. Tell me about La La Land, the musical you&amp;#039;re planning with Emma Watson. It&amp;#039;s in LA. It is a full musical\u2014we&amp;#039;ll have singing, large dance numbers\u2014and I play a jazz pianist, and he meets Emma Watson&amp;#039;s character. They kind of find each other and share this dream of making it in LA. And it&amp;#039;s all those wonderful things that come with first love and feeling like you&amp;#039;re about to make it, and then maybe that doesn&amp;#039;t happen, and then kind of seeing how that affects the relationship when two people are going for something and maybe one starts to achieve it and the other doesn&amp;#039;t. It should be very cool with Damien doing it. Despite it being a musical, it should be very real and grounded. It was nice chatting, Miles! Go get over that hangover or sleep in a bit. Neither of those is going to happen, but I appreciate it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a3993/whiplash-miles-teller/>